That gagging sound you heard last week, when Ann Romney bellowed in her best Oprah voice, “I love you, womennnnnn!”? That was me.

And not because I don’t love women; I do. And not because I don’t believe that Ann Romney loves women; I’m sure she does. It’s because, at best, this sentiment is utterly beside the point. And at worst, it’s a cynical, calculated, transparent attempt to chip away at the current and sizable gender gap among voters.

My thoughts crystallized this weekend, while reading an adaptation from Hanna Rosin‘s forthcoming book “The End of Men: And the Rise of Women,” which ran in Sunday’s New York Times magazine. The piece–and Rosin’s book, which grew out of a much dissected article that ran in The Atlantic two years ago–focuses on several real-life families in Alexander City, Alabama, families who now rely on mom to bring home the bacon, a circumstance which leaves everyone puzzling over the reversal of roles. This change of fortune comes thanks to a confluence of factors including the disappearance of good-paying work in the manufacturing sector (jobs traditionally held by men), and the fact that the economy has changed, as have the types of jobs that are available, and the skills that are needed in order to land them:

These days that usually requires going to college or getting some job retraining, which women are generally more willing to do. Two-thirds of the students at the local community college are women, which is fairly typical of the gender breakdown in community colleges throughout the country.

These shifts represent a reality that bumps with the worldview there, informed by both Southern tradition and the Evangelical church. Rosin writes of a conversation with Reuben Prater, currently out of work:

Reuben has a college degree and doesn’t seem especially preoccupied with machismo, so I asked him why, given how many different kinds of jobs he has held, he couldn’t train for one of the jobs that he knew was available: something related to schools, nursing or retail, for example. One reason was obvious–those jobs don’t pay as much as he was accustomed to making–but he said there was another. ‘We’re in the South,’ he told me. ‘A man needs a strong, macho job. He’s not going to be a schoolteacher or a legal secretary or some beauty-shop queen. He’s got to be a man.’ I asked several businesswomen in Alexander City if they would hire a man to be a secretary or a receptionist or a nurse, and many of them just laughed.

All of which makes me chuckle a bit, when one considers this:

‘An important long-term issue is that men are not doing as well as women in keeping up with the demands of the local economy,’ says Michael Greenstone, an economist at M.I.T. and director of the Hamilton Project, which has done some of the most significant research on men and unemployment. ‘It’s a first-order mystery for social scientists, why women have more clearly heard the message that the economy has changed and men have such a hard time hearing it or responding.’

Why shouldn’t they have a hard time? We’re talking about nothing short of a wholesale redefinition of what it is to be a man. Or a woman. We’re talking about nothing short of a wholesale redefinition of what’s valued–and when, for centuries, to be a man was to hold power and make money, finding a woman to fill the role of “helpmate” along his ascent, I’d say it’s not mysterious at all that men are having a hard time hearing the message that things are changing.

Who wants to hear that their status is in jeopardy, their power no longer assured? Who wouldn’t find themselves at a loss?

And, as for the women, we’re taking on the challenges because we can. To earn a paycheck was not something expected of us as women; it’s something we’ve had to fight for the right to do.

And it’s not just the middle-aged men who have careers and lives to look back upon as they wonder what changed who are idling. Even young men seem resistant to what’s really going on. One family profiled in Rosin’s piece exemplifies it all: Rob Pridgen, whose job had recently been phased out; his wife Connie, a high school teacher; and her grown daughter Abby, who found Rob’s explanation of “man-as-provider” laughable:

At this point… Abby, who was then 19, piped up with her own perspective on the Southern code of chivalry, which she said sounded like nonsense to her, given how the boys she knew actually behaved–hanging out in the parking lot, doing God knows what, or going home and playing video games instead of bothering to apply for college…

[Another] afternoon, while Rob sat nearby, Connie and Abby were mulling over a passage from Proverbs that is sometimes read at church for Mother’s Day and that had come up in a Bible-study group.

The passage describes the ‘wife of noble character,’ who works with the wool and the flax, brings the food from afar, who ‘gets up while it is still dark,’ buys a field, plants a vineyard, turns a profit, and ‘her lamp does not go out at night’ because she’s still sewing clothes for the poor and generally being industrious while everyone else sleeps. Her husband, meanwhile, ‘is respected at the city gate, where he takes his seat among the elders of the land.’

Traditionally the passage has been viewed as an elaboration of the proper roles of husband and wife. The husband sits in the dominant, protective role, watching his wife’s efforts on behalf of the family and taking pride. But in a town in which many men aren’t working steadily anymore, the words have taken on new meaning. There are people who have noticed that the passage never mentions what the husband is doing or what role he’s playing in providing food for his family, tilling the fields or turning a profit. And what’s dawning on Connie these last few months became obvious to Abby and Rob as she read the passage out loud. That noble wife is working from dawn to dusk. And the husband?

‘Sounds like he’s sitting around with his buddies shooting the breeze, talking about the ballgame and eating potato chips,’ Rob said.

Abby wasn’t surprised. Around Alex City, she said it seemed that it was the girls who were full of energy and eager to see the world. Her own brother, Alex, who was 17, seemed to want to stay in town forever and raise his family here. But Abby was enrolled in Southern Union State Community College, attending on a show-choir scholarship. Her plan was to go there for a year, as many girls in Alex City do, to save money, and then head to Auburn University.

Things are changing in major ways. And change is tough to deal with. But while we’re all puzzling over these seismic shifts is precisely the wrong time to accept blatant pandering with nothing of substance beneath it. And it makes such pandering even more offensive. Women are important to Republicans only in as much as a vote is a vote. But women are increasingly important to this economy, not to mention to the financial support of the typical family and household–we are, in so many ways, patently integral to the success of our society. And the outdated structures and policies we’re left with–and some are fighting fervently to preserve–are relics of a bygone era, useless as typewriters or VCRs. To refuse to recognize the changing times is the worst kind of denial–one that breeds backward-looking policies and irrelevant debate. Our society and our economy need us. To truly value women would be to prioritize policies that help working mothers, health care for everyone, reproductive rights. To patronize women by saying “we love you,” or “your job has always been harder,” is useless when it’s paired with a refusal to acknowledge who today’s women actually are, what they actually do. Because it’s not just women who depend on it.

Out here in Silicon Valley, you can’t cross the street without bumping into an engineer. And what you find is that three our of four of them are men. As Shankar Vedantam once reported in Slate:

The gender distribution of engineers at top Silicon Valley companies is similar to the gender distribution of the audience at your average strip club.

Creepy, but not surprising. According to stats out of the U.S. Department of Labor, women make up only one quarter of the workforce when it comes to jobs related to computers or math. Some folks call it the leaky pipeline: Women drop out of math and engineering programs before they ever hit the job market. I should know. I started college as a math major. By sophomore year, I bailed.

One theory that’s out there suggests that women opt out because of the perception that careers in engineering, by their very nature, are not compatible with future mommy-hood.

Another one, most odiously put forth by erstwhile Harvard president Lawrence Summers, former head of President Obama’s National Economic Council, is that women, by nature, just don’t have the mental chops for science and math. Ugh, right?

Turns out, neither of the above are true. According to a new study published in the American Sociological Review, one of the crucial reasons women opt out of careers in engineering before they’ve ever opted in is confidence. Or, more precisely, lack of same. It’s not that these women can’t make the grade, the study found. It’s that, when it comes to venturing out into the workplace, they don’t think they’ll fit.

You don’t have to be an engineer (and odds are pretty good that you’re not) — or ever have had dreams of being one — to find some resonance in what the study found.

The researchers surveyed 288 students who entered engineering programs in 2003 at MIT, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, and Smith College. They found that the women students took the same classes, took the same tests and earned the same — or higher grades — as the male students. And yet, they ended up feeling less confident in their abilities — or in the idea that a career in engineering was right for them.

One thing that’s interesting to note is that the prospect of parenthood had nothing to do with it, at least for the women. “We find that women’s desires to have a family do not influence whether they continue in an engineering major or plan to go into the engineering workforce,” said the study’s lead author Erin Cech, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research. In fact, she told us, “The study found that men, rather than, women, were more likely to perceive that engineering was likely to interfere with raising a family.”

That settles that. What undermines the female students’ confidence, and persistence, Cech says, is what she calls micro-biases, or those subtle stereotypes about what men and women are naturally good at. “In engineering, for example, men are often thought to be “naturally” good at the “technical” aspects of engineering, where women are through to be “naturally” good at the “social” aspects of engineering, like teamwork and communication. If men engineering students are subtly though to be more competent at engineering tasks than women, then men and women engineering students will be treated slightly differently by their peers and their professors.” All of which snowballs in women, leading to a gradual erosion in confidence that they’ll ever fit in.

This new study seems to be right in line with an older one on that we’ve riffed on before. That one suggested that women avoid math and science, not because they lack the aptitude, but because they don’t feel welcome. Call it identity threat: women may avoid situations — like math or engineering — when they feel outnumbered. Researchers Mary Murphy, Claude Steele and James Gross found that when women math, science and engineering undergrads simply watched a video that pitched a fictional conference where men outnumbered women, the women showed the physical signs of threat — faster heart rates and sweating — and reported a lower sense of belonging, and less desire to participate in the conference at all. The researchers also found that the women who watched the gender unbalanced video were more vigilant of their surroundings overall.

Point being, it’s the threat, as much as the reality, that often keeps us out of the game. And not just when it comes to science or math.

A recent post on the Harvard Business Review noted that confidence was likewise one of the issues that kept women out of the corporate suites. As writers Jill Flynn, Kathryn Heath, and Mary Davis Holt — nationally recognized experts on women’s leadership — wrote:

Having combed through more than a thousand 360-degree performance assessments conducted in recent years, we’ve found, by a wide margin, that the primary criticism men have about their female colleagues is that the women they work with seem to exhibit low self-confidence.

They writers cite a 2011 study out of Europe’s Institute of Leadership and Management that quantifies the gender confidence gap (half of women managers admitted to self-doubt about their performance and career, for example, versus less than a third of men) and suggest that this lack of confidence leads to too much modesty; the inability to make the big ask; avoiding attention; and remaining silent, especially at business meetings.

Ouch.

All of this confidence gap comes at a cost. (Seventy-seven cents on the dollar, remember?) That which keeps us out of the labs and out of the boardrooms, often keeps us out of the money, right? But back to Erin Cech and her would-be engineers.

“The root of the problem are biases that are deeply embedded in people’s cultural beliefs about of gender and the nature of the work in science and engineering professions,” she told us. “The ultimate solution would be to change those beliefs. Such cultural change is maddeningly difficult and slow. So, perhaps the next best thing is to actually talk about the way that science and engineering fields are gendered within engineering and science classrooms. Such talk is considered “political” and thus “irrelevant” in most science and engineering classrooms, and so is never discussed. But, what could be more relevant than the retention of students within those very professions?”

Or, for that matter, any others. (Oh, for the record: It wasn’t lack of confidence that prompted me to change my major. Sigh. It was calculus.)

Surely you’ve heard about that million dollar lawsuit against Amazon filed by an anonymous actress who claims that Internet Movie Database (which is owned by Amazon) damaged her ability to get work because it published her age. According to the Daily Dot, the lawsuit claimed:

“If one is perceived to be ‘over-the-hill,’ i.e., approaching 40, it is nearly impossible for an up-and-coming actress, such as the plaintiff, to get work as she is thought to have less of an ‘upside,’ therefore, casting directors, producers, directors, agents-manager, etc. do not give her the same opportunities, regardless of her appearance or talent…”

I know nothing about the woman, other than that she is an Asian from Texas who claims to look young for her age. I know nothing about her resume. I have no idea whether she has talent. I don’t know whether it’s a legitimate lawsuit or she’s just out to make a quick buck. I don’t even know how old she is.

But what I do know is this. Put a man of a certain age up on the big screen and he’s not only viable as an actor, but might generate some fantasies: George Clooney is 50. Richard Gere is 62. Pierce Brosnan: 58. Sean Connery was named the sexiest man of the year by people magazine back in 1999 when he was, I believe, 68. Viggo Mortensen is 58. Colin Firth and Hugh Grant: Both 50. And Jeremy Irons? You may not find him especially sexy, but as Pope Alexander VI in the TV series The Borgias, he gets more than his share of action. He is 62.

Now let’s turn the tables: Who are the leading ladies of the same age, with the same kind of currency, the same box office draw? Can’t think of many, can you? Not necessarily because they aren’t equally talented as actors, or equally sexy, but because they just don’t get the parts.

There could be any number of reasons for this, none of them especially pleasant to contemplate, but what we want to focus on today is just one of them: the gender make-up of Hollywood itself.

For years we have decried the fact that the old guy always gets the cute girl in the movies. We have for years ranted: about the schlubby guys on TV who have the slim trim wives; about the loser guys who end up with, you know, Katherine Heigl; about the sweet young things who are wooed by the guys old enough to be their grandpas.

You have to ask yourself: who writes this stuff? And the answer, as we discovered when we researched our book, is this: predominantly men. Back in 2009, the Hollywood Writers Report found that women and minorities had not made any significant hiring gains since 2005, with women writers making up roughly one-quarter of the field: 28 percent of TV writers and 18 percent of film writers.Their salaries also showed a discrepancy: White men $98,875, versus women $57,151—for a whopping wage gap of $41,724.40.

When we checked in with the their latest report, released a few months ago, we found that women’s share had actually declined:

The present report shows that women writers remain stuck at 28 percent of television employment, while their share of film employment actually declined a percentage point since the last report to 17 percent. Although the minority share of television employment increased a percentage point to 10 percent (matching the shares evident in years immediately prior to the 2007 nadir), the group’s share of film employment declined to just 5 percent – the lowest figure in at least ten years.

In 2010, women comprised 16% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films. This represents a decline of 1 percentage point from 1998 and is even with 2009 figures.

Women accounted for 7% of directors in 2010, the same percentage as in 2009. This figure represents a decline of two percentage points from 1998.

Likewise, a 2011 study by USC’s Annenberg Center found that when it came to creative positions in general, including directing or producing, women were again grossly outnumbered. In a piece on the study for the Women’s Media Center, the researchers for that study, Stacy L. Smith and Marc Choueiti, wrote:

Turning to behind-the-camera employees, the gender gap is far more problematic. For every one working female director, writer, or producer, there are 4.9 working males in the same above-the-line gate-keeping positions. Stated in another way, only 8 percent of directors, 13.6 percent of writers, and 19.1 percent of producers were female across the 100 top-grossing films in 2008. These numbers are unsettling, as one way to diversify images on screen may be to vary the personnel responsible for making the content. In fact, this is exactly what our results showed. When one or more females are involved directing, writing, or producing, the number of females on screen increases substantially (see Figure 1). In the case of screenwriters, the presence of at least one female on the writing team was associated with a 14.3 percent increase in the percentage of female characters on screen.

All of this has an impact — three words for you: The Playboy Club, which fortunately just met its timely demise — as the reseachers noted, not the least of which is the fact that when there’s no diversity behind the camera, the women we see in front of it are not only showing a lot of skin, but often unrealistically young. (Backstage reports that women over 40 account for a mere 8 percent of characters in the 2010-11 and 2011-12 TV seasons to date).

And really what our culture is communicating to us is vis-a-vis the media, which is this pedagogical force of communication in our culture, is that a woman’s value lies in her youth, her beauty, and her sexuality and not in her capacity to lead…

Back in 2010 when Meryl Streep — the exception who proves the rule? — made news by starring as a sexual being in “It’s Complicated”, she was the subject of a cover story in Vanity Fair, which dug into the stereotypical way in which the media treat women of a certain age:

Any inhibitions notwithstanding, a vibrant sexuality has remained a crucial aspect of Streep’s appeal, despite her advancing years and the limitations that others might try to impose in response. When Clint Eastwood cast her to star opposite him in The Bridges of Madison County, which won Streep an Oscar nomination for best actress, in 1996, his reason was simple: “She’s the greatest actress in the world,” he said with a shrug.

That said, Streep reports, “There was a big fight over how I was too old to play the part, even though Clint was nearly 20 years older than me. The part was for a 45-year-old woman, and Clint said, ‘This is a 45-year-old woman.’”

Old news, perhaps. But have things changed in the past 15 years? Probably not, which brings us back to that Amazon lawsuit. Frivolous or not, it makes you wonder about the biggest question of all: Does Hollywood reflect our reality — or determine it?